Gas-path diagnostics is an essential part of gas turbine (GT) condition-based maintenance (CBM). There exists extensive literature on GT gas-path diagnostics and a variety of methods have been introduced. The fundamental limitations of the conventional methods such as the inability to deal with the nonlinear engine behavior, measurement uncertainty, simultaneous faults, and the limited number of sensors available remain the driving force for exploring more advanced techniques. This review aims to provide a critical survey of the existing literature produced in the area over the past few decades. In the first section, the issue of GT degradation is addressed, aiming to identify the type of physical faults that degrade a gas turbine performance, which gas-path faults contribute more significantly to the overall performance loss, and which specific components often encounter these faults. A brief overview is then given about the inconsistencies in the literature on gas-path diagnostics followed by a discussion of the various challenges against successful gas-path diagnostics and the major desirable characteristics that an advanced fault diagnostic technique should ideally possess. At this point, the available fault diagnostic methods are thoroughly reviewed, and their strengths and weaknesses summarized. Artificial intelligence (AI) based and hybrid diagnostic methods have received a great deal of attention due to their promising potentials to address the above-mentioned limitations along with providing accurate diagnostic results. Moreover, the available validation techniques that system developers used in the past to evaluate the performance of their proposed diagnostic algorithms are discussed. Finally, concluding remarks and recommendations for further investigations are provided.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present a quantitative fault diagnostic technique for a two-shaft gas turbine engine applications. Design/methodology/approach: Nested artificial neural networks (NANNs) were used to estimate the progressive deterioration of single and multiple gas-path components in terms of mass flow rate and isentropic efficiency indices. The data required to train and test this method are attained from a thermodynamic model of the engine under steady-state conditions. To evaluate the tolerance of the method against measurement uncertainties, Gaussian noise values were considered. Findings: The test results revealed that this proposed method is capable of quantifying single, double and triple component faults with a sufficiently high degree of accuracy. Moreover, the authors confirmed that NANNs have derivable advantages over the single structure-based methods available in the public domain, particularly over those designed to perform single and multiple faults together. Practical implications: This method can be used to assess engine’s health status to schedule its maintenance. Originality/value: For complicated gas turbine diagnostic problems, the conventional single artificial neural network (ANN) structure-based fault diagnostic technique may not be enough to get robust and accurate results. The diagnostic task can rather be better done if it is divided and shared with multiple neural network structures. The authors thus used seven decentralized ANN structures to assess seven different component fault scenarios, which enhances the fault identification accuracy significantly.